Real-time decision-making

Real-time decision-making explained

Real-time decision-making is often topic for debate, in many cases fed by a variety of technology perspectives. For example, big data, predictive and prescriptive analytics trends and technology providers all touch upon this topic of real-time decision-making.

As such, defining this concept is primarily based on consensus towards: real-time provisioning of information needed for the decision-making process, integrated in context and work-flows through any device to any decision maker anywhere and anytime.

Though conceptual, this explanation of real-time decision-making offers substantial guidance to organisations working towards its application. It clearly identifies two crucial actors:

the decision maker and;

a device for provisioning information for decision support.

Real-time decision-making vs predictive analytics

What remains is the actual provisioning of information, the topic often feeding the debate surrounding real-time decision-making. And with continuous technology development, this makes complete sense. With new technologies becoming available, information provisioning capabilities improve as well. Consider for example analytics. What started as purely looking to past data has evolved dramatically over the past years towards predictive and prescriptive analytics on enterprise and big data sources in near real-time, delivering an ever-increasing stream of information towards decision makers.

Other technologies on the other hand, like complex event processing, contribute by offering support in processing all the information available and reducing contextual complexity for the decision maker. And considering technology developments, decision automation is the next step, offering great potential in cost savings and efficiency improvements through increasing both speed and consistency of decision making processes.

It’s not a question of which technology is best capable for decision support applications for real-time, dynamic decision-making. The question is what combination is best suited. In what kind of information environment are you functioning? And to what extent is semi- or fully automating decision-making desired?